ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how the knowledge needed for the construction of a Knowledge-Based System could be materialised in the first instance, with as few a priori assumptions about its representation as possible. The new partition of the field into Knowledge Elicitation and Knowledge Engineering results in bringing out the roles and mutual interactions of the Expert, Knowledge Elicitor and Knowledge Engineer in a more explicit way. Knowledge elicitation is similar to the case of compiling a Pascal program with a Cobol compiler. The very first thing that a knowledge elicitor should realise is that knowledge is a complex entity with a complex multi-level structure. The knowledge elicitation activity, like any other interaction, is between two elements, that is, elicitor and expert. To capture completely the process of designing an expert system one generally needs to consider three phases; namely, familiarisation with the problem, knowledge elicitation, and knowledge engineering.
